Real life vs. Eric Rohmer movies
During another futile attempt to impose order in my household, I found my stash of Eric Rohmer movies. I thought it would be fun to listen to people analyzing themselves in French while I cleaned the house, so I popped My Night At Maud’s in the DVD player. For the ambience, as they say of bad restaurants. But I made the mistake of glancing at the screen and reading the subtitles, and I was glued. No more housecleaning was done that day.
I didn’t realize I was a Rohmer fan until about the 10th time I heard myself comparing real life to an Eric Rohmer movie. His movies don’t feel like movies — more like a bunch of people sitting around and talking. Or walking around and talking, but always, always talking. What they’re thinking, what they think someone else is thinking, what they should be doing but haven’t done, whether they are deceiving themselves, what their true feelings might be under all those words. Nothing seems to be happening, but after some time, they realize that something has happened after all — a shift so subtle they almost missed it. Before they know it they’ve made a choice, before you know it the movie’s over.
Not most people’s idea of a movie. When people say “talky, annoying French movie” they probably mean a Rohmer. In a movie you expect something to happen externally: they’re called “motion pictures,” after all. I suspect that one reason we go to the movies is to watch things happen, because in actual life things rarely do. (Or when something does happen, we only realize it in hindsight.) If you think about it, Eric Rohmer’s movies are truer to life — if everyone were extremely articulate.
This does not explain how, in a “quiet” movie like Autumn Tale, when the would-be lovers nearly miss each other at the station, the audience members were beside themselves. “No!” they yelled at the screen, “Don’t leave! He’s on his way!”
When I saw my first Rohmer at a French film festival at the Shangri-La mall in the 1990s, I didn’t even know it was by Rohmer. I thought it was an early work by Barbet Schroeder, the director of Reversal of Fortune. Schroeder was in fact the star and producer.
In The Bakery Girl of Monceau, a law student in Paris in the 1960s becomes enamored of a stylish young woman he sees around the neighborhood. He contrives to meet her, they hit it off, but then she disappears. He walks around the Monceau area, hoping to run into her. During his walks he gets into the habit of stopping at a certain bakery for cookies. They’re not even very good cookies, they’re factory-produced, but you know how habits are.
At the bakery, the young man meets the girl behind the counter. She’s nothing like the girl he’s quietly hunting — she’s lower-class, uneducated, slatternly. Her best quality is that she’s there and available while the true object of his desires is absent and inaccessible (which makes her even more desirable). So he asks the bakery girl to go out with him. She demurs at first, not out of any scruples, but because one is expected to demur when propositioned by a stranger. They set a date.
On the day our young man is supposed to see the bakery girl, his real object reappears. With her leg in a cast — that’s why he hadn’t seen her in weeks, she’d been staying at her sister’s. She asks him if he’d like to get a coffee, and of course he says yes. The bakery girl is forgotten.
That’s the movie? Yes, and it’s riveting. Here is a situation many of us have been in. While it’s happening we tell ourselves that we’re doing what’s best for everyone. In truth we’re doing what we think is best for ourselves, and that is the most we can manage. We only see one path, ours; “the common good” usually means “my benefit.” Life is cruel, but in Rohmer movies it is cruel and civilized.
